


to the bone

by cygnes



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-03
Updated: 2017-08-03
Packaged: 2018-12-10 19:15:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11698155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/pseuds/cygnes
Summary: Among the bones, in endless night, the gunslinger and the man in black discuss some things better left alone.





	to the bone

**Author's Note:**

> The first few lines are taken directly from the revised edition of _The Gunslinger_ , and there are other lines pulled from that book scattered elsewhere in the fic. Useful info, if it's been a while: Roland's fortune included The Hanged Man (Roland), The Sailor (Jake), The Prisoner (Eddie), The Lady of the Shadows (Odetta/Detta/Susannah), Death, The Tower, and Life—the last of which begins our current story.

"The seventh card is Life," the man in black said softly. "But not for you." 

"Where does it fit the pattern?"

"That is not for you to know," the man in black said. "Or for me to know. I'm not the great one you seek, Roland. I am merely his emissary." He flipped the card carelessly into the dying fire. It charred, curled, and flashed to flame. The gunslinger felt his heart quail and turn icy in his chest.

"And what of your future?" Roland said. "Could Death, not mine, be yours?"

The man in black looked unimpressed by this speculation. "If you want to know about me, you'll have to draw the cards yourself."

"Give them to me, then," Roland said, and held out his hand. The man in black riffled his thumb down one corner of the deck, considering. Roland thought he might throw the rest of them into the fire, too. He didn't, in the end. He handed them over without further ceremony.

"Let's keep it simple," the man in black said. "Shuffle the cards and deal three, face-up. It may come to nothing. Drawing more cards won't give you more answers."

"The answers are for you," Roland said. He knew both might be true. He shuffled the cards—not as dexterously as the man in black had, but well enough. His hands were trained for other things; steadiness was useful in any case. 

The first card showed a hooded man with an axe. "The Executioner," the man in black said. Then, more drily: "You are astonishingly literal-minded. The first card is my past. And I have been an executioner."

"A hangman," the gunslinger said. It made sense, if the Hanged Man in his own fortune represented Roland himself. But the man in black shook his head. 

"A _headsman_ ," the man in black corrected him. "My axe was two-headed, but otherwise—as I said. Quite literal."

"You sentenced cities to death," Roland said, "and did not use an axe for that."

"Draw another card," the man in black said. His mouth had become a thin line, unsmiling. Before Roland could do it, he went on. "I did not _sentence_ them. Again, I was an executioner. Delivering judgment, not passing it." A smile crept back onto his face. "Maybe I was not even that. Maybe I was the axe itself." His laugh was dry, brittle, like old branches broken down to twigs for kindling. It sounded like it belonged to the dying fire.

Roland turned the second card. The Emperor, upside down. 

"You handle the cards well," the man in black said. "Like you've had practice. Do you enjoy games of chance?"

"This is not a game," the gunslinger said. 

"Isn't it?" the man in black said. Then: "No, I guess it isn't."

"Tell me what it means," Roland said. 

"You drew the card," the man in black said.

The gunslinger considered the card for a long moment. "A false king, or a king deposed."

"I did say it might come to nothing," the man in black said with a dismissive gesture. Too dismissive—too careless. There was something here that he didn't want Roland to see. A king, and the opposite of that. A king turned on his head. 

"The one you serve," Roland said. "Are you loyal to him?"

"He brought me up from obscurity," the man in black said. "Since I was a boy, he came to me in dreams. He told me what was needful. What I needed, and what was needed of me. And through the centuries I found my way, guided by his hand."

"He damned you," Roland said.

The man in black laughed, and this time it was a high, lonesome sound, like the cry of a bird. "In the same way I damned you, Roland son of Steven. Draw your last card."

The image on this card was familiar. The Tower, again, but this time inverted like the Emperor. 

"We'll meet again, I think," the man in black said. "One way or another." He held out his hand and Roland recoiled. "The cards," the man in black said. "Unless you'd rather keep them to pass the time. We have as much time as we need."

"For what?" Roland said. He shuffled the three cards back into the deck but did not return the deck to its owner. 

"You caught me," the man in black said. His smile had turned mocking, but Roland couldn't be sure that mockery was directed at him. "You caught me and cannot kill me. What else would you do but talk?"

"And play cards," Roland said, turning the deck over in his hands. 

"Games of chance," the man in black said again. "Your father didn't care for them, but your mother did. I imagine she taught you some." The embers cast him in strange shadows, light glinting off his teeth and eyes like sparks while the rest of him faded and receded into dimness. O' Dim, that was the name he used most recently. Here, on the edge of night, it suited him very well. 

"My mother," Roland echoed. "I did not think you knew her well." 

"Oh, very well," the man in black said. "Biblically, in fact, as followers of the Man Jesus might say." Seeing Roland's blank look, the elaborated: "Better than I knew the minister Pittston in Tull. More thoroughly. More frequently."

The gunslinger was on his feet before he could consider what he meant to do. The cards fell from his hand and scattered. Under his boots, bones crunched—the hollow bones of carrion birds, or more substantial bones turned brittle with age. The man in black leaned back slightly to look up at him. 

"Don't speak of her that way," Roland said. His hands, hovering close by his gunbelts, were still steady. His voice was not. 

"You killed her," the man in black said, "so I don't see why it would bother you. Or is that the reason why?" 

Roland held himself still, taut as a bowstring drawn back in the moment before the arrow flies. The man in black could not be ignorant of that threat but he was unconcerned. He leaned down and picked up a few of the fallen cards. Roland's eyes, though sharp, suddenly seemed less reliable. He saw the mouth of the Devil yawn wide in the man in black's hand, while the High Priestess shed from his touch.

"She did not die for that," Roland said. He might have forgiven her anything that was in his power to forgive.

"You knew already," the man in black said. "And you never forgot." The card in his hand now was The Lovers. Sleight of hand seemed more likely than the workings of _ka_ , but in this endless night, in the company of a sorcerer—Roland would not wager one way or the other.

"I knew my mother had one lover," he said. "No others."

"Why would you doubt that now?" the man in black said. "You may not be clever, Roland of Eld, Roland of fallen Gilead, but you're not stupid. You think in straight lines instead of around corners, but you are capable of intelligent thought."

"Marten," Roland said, half in wonder and half in fury. The man in black inclined his head and said nothing. A sense of heaviness settled over the gunslinger as a cloak might settle over his shoulders. A _broad cloak_ , Roland thought with rare grim humor. Or maybe the thought was not his own. His eyes slid closed. It was like being borne out to sea by some terrible, inexorable tide. He had to try to keep it from dragging him under.

"You've known me longer than you wanted to admit," said a voice that was neither Walter's nor Marten's but something in between. "Was it easier to imagine yourself outmatched by several enemies than outwitted by one?" Roland had no answer. He didn't think the man in black really wanted one. "Maybe you never trusted me," the voice went on. It sounded very like Marten now. "But you only saw what I chose to show you, instincts aside."

He had trusted Marten once. That was the devil of it. He had trusted him and been fascinated by him. The fascination lingered even when the trust had started to sour. Marten didn't fit neatly into the way Roland understood the world as a boy. Not a gunslinger like Roland's father or the other men he was meant to revere and imitate—not a diplomat or a courtier, not a merchant or a tradesman. He spoke the High Speech like a man born to it but would sometimes drop in words or phrases alien to his interlocutor. Alien to the language itself, perhaps alien to the human tongue.

Marten was not a court magician the way Maerlyn had been a court magician in the days of Arthur Eld. Even the word 'magician' was rarely spoken except by maids and serving-men. Marten was advisor to the Tet of the Gun and to Steven Deschain more particularly. He did not commune with the dead or turn lead into gold or reawaken ancient great machines, at least not where anyone could see him do it. He was shrewd and strange and that seemed to be what made him valuable.

And yet—he did do magic. Roland had never doubted it, even before he knew with any certainty. That had formed the core of his earliest interest in Marten. 

"I wonder what you would have done if I had come to you then," Marten's voice said. "You might have been horrified." He switched over to the High Speech, rife as it was with double meaning. "Or you might have opened for me like a flower. Like your mother did." In poems, the word for flower could have a hundred meanings depending on its placement in a phrase or the meter around it. Here and now, the implication was uglier.

Roland would indeed have been horrified. It would have been the horror of having his secret thoughts known. Thoughts almost secret from himself, thoughts that appealed only when he was alone and only because they were so impossible. Like a pleasant dream that becomes a nightmare upon waking.

He was not horrified here and now. He was no stripling lad, shying from thoughts of the act of love even as his blood ran hot. Those days were long behind him. The days of thinking of sex as an act of love had been behind him for a long time, too. Maybe since he was fourteen. Maybe since Marten had invited him into his mother's rooms and framed a rose-colored bruise on her neck with one pale hand.

(Had it ever been an act of love, except with the girl with wheat-gold hair? The girl who burned away and left him halfway hollow?)

The gunslinger realized suddenly that the heaviness over him had pulled him down deep indeed. He was drowning in thought and memory, warm and slow. He felt the press of a hand on his thigh, moving up along the inseam of his trousers. Without opening his eyes, he knew it was a tapered, handsome hand. Walter's hand; Marten's hand. The hand of the man in black. The hand of a hunter reaching out to see if the animal in his trap still has any fight left in it.

_Let him come closer_ , Roland thought, and waited.

The hand (questing, kneading at the flesh of his leg more like a butcher than a lover) had not quite made it to his crotch when Roland lunged. His eyes opened easily now. As the hand drifted up his leg, Roland had let his mind drift up from the queasy pit of memory. He knew how to do it. It was hypnosis in reverse.

His hands found only air. The man in black still sat across from him, out of reach. The cards were gone and nothing else had changed. 

"Shall we speak truth, as equals?" the man in black said. His voice was Walter's again, speaking the common tongue. "Lovers lie endlessly." A grin flashed across his face. "And _lay_ endlessly, until the laying's done. It can only ever be a distraction."

"Speak truth, then," Roland said. "Even if the night is long, we may tire."

The man in black looked into the fire. It didn't seem to be burning quite as low as it had before. Some small magic, maybe. "Gabrielle Verriss bent beneath me like a willow, but she never broke. That may be a comfort to you."

"I did not seek you out to talk about my mother," Roland said. The man in black went on, heedless. 

"She never would have carried a bastard. She would sooner have cut it out, I think," he said. The gunslinger thought again, and uneasily, of the minister in Tull. "What happened between us was a private shame, no matter how oft repeated. To give her husband another man's child would have been a public shame and a shared one."

Roland remembered his mother's averted gaze, her rueful smile. She had been ashamed then. _I have forgotten the face of my mother_ , he thought. It wasn't something he had ever troubled to remember. "Is that the truth?" he said.

"It's _a_ truth," the main in black said. "There are always more to share. More every turn of the wheel, though you rarely remember. What does that matter when we have all night?"

"I would speak of the Tower," the gunslinger said.

"We have been," the man in black said. Then: "If I let you put your hands on me, how would you be revenged? Could you be satisfied by killing me only once?"

"We could find out," Roland said. The man in black laughed, almost howling. The baying of a wild dog. 

"And how would you pass the time without me?" he said. "You'd go for the throat because it's obvious and efficient, but that would be over too quickly. You have a knife, though, and I'm sure you've picked up some harriers' tricks in your day. Where would you peel the skin down to bone?" The man in black's tone was almost gleeful. He was enjoying this. Roland didn't want to oblige him by saying so, but the answer came to him immediately. The flesh over his ribs would have to go first. He would look inside the cage of the man in black's chest to see if his heart still beat. To see if he had a heart at all, or if there were only bones under the skin.

"I am no harrier," the gunslinger said. 

"No," the man in black agreed. "You're something much worse, and I couldn't be more proud." 

The last whole branch in the bed of the fire crumbled to three pieces and sent up a shower of sparks and ash.

"There we are," the man in black said. He pointed at one tiny point of light, following it in a graceful arc until it winked out.

"I don't understand you," Roland said.

"Ain't that the truth," the man in black said. He spread his hands out before him. "But I'll give you the opportunity."

_Let there be light._

(And there was.)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is dedicated with affection and apologies to both [scioscribe](http://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe) and [skazka](http://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/pseuds/skazka). I cry your pardon, first for trying to write a sexually-charged palaver scene and second for failing to incorporate the canonical line "you are my climax."
> 
> There are some passing references to Dark Tower books other than _The Gunslinger_ , but I think the reference that most merits explanation is the first. The mention of the man in black as an executioner is a callback to _The Eyes of the Dragon_ , where it's mentioned that Flagg spent some time in Delain as the royal executioner. Mostly I just thought that would be a rad fake Tarot card, haha.


End file.
